Apple's iPad is not the only tablet in town of course: networking giant Cisco revealed last month that it has cooked up an Android-based slate aimed at enterprise users.

Due for release early next year, the Cius, pictured above, will integrate with Cisco collaboration software such as its TelePresence videoconferencing application, WebEx online meeting software and its UC offerings.

The device will also be able to draw on third-party apps via the Android Market.

July also saw Microsoft hold its eighth annual Imagine Cup contest, in which students from around the world attempt to solve global problems using technology.

This year's competition attracted entries from 325,000 high school, college and university students from 113 countries.

Shown above is the Korean team demonstrating the R U Gentle system to the judges at the Imagine Cup final held in Warsaw, Poland. The system is aimed at helping drivers operate their vehicles in the most efficient way, reducing emissions and saving money partly by reducing driver stress, meaning they drive more responsibly.

More notable Microsoft news came in the form of an update on its mobile OS, Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft began shipping preview devices from Samsung and LG to developers last month in order that they can begin real-world testing of their apps before the big launch. silicon.com sister site CNET News.com had a few days with one of the preview devices to take Windows Phone 7 for a test drive.

A large part of Windows Phone 7 is centred around Hubs, which brings together related content into one central zone. Pictured above is the People hub, where you can find all your contacts, see their status updates, and more.

Like Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, the Samsung Wave was also initially unveiled at Mobile World Congress in February.

This month, silicon.com sister site CNET News took at closer look at the device - the first phone to use Samsung's Bada mobile operating system.

The Wave's touchscreen and Samsung's TouchWiz 3.0 user interface house the majority of controls, but there are a couple of physical buttons below the display, including Talk and End/power keys and a main menu button, pictured here.

Samsung may be showing off Bada phones but it's not put a halt to its work on Google-based devices.

Last month silicon.com also featured the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy phone, which features a Super Amoled touchscreen and the Layar Reality Browser that allows users to view augmented reality content.

From Racers to Colliders: the Large Hadron Collider is a mammoth, $8bn particle accelerator housed in a ring 27km in circumference about 100 meters beneath a valley west of Geneva and operated by a multinational nuclear physics organisation called Cern.

It's designed to look back at the earliest moments of the universe and last month silicon.com's sister site CNET News.com went for a look around.

Pictured here is a view inside the Atlas detector, which physicists hope to use to find and detail the Higgs boson, a particle believed to imbue more conventional matter with mass.

The LHC wasn't the only great scientific institution opening its doors last month: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also took silicon.com for a look around its Media Lab to see some of the technologies that it is working on.

This is SandScape, a system that allows people to reshape a computer-generated model of physical terrain using their hands, as seen here.

Scientific experiments including research on genomics, epidemiology, cosmology and more have all been through the University of Cambridge's high-performance computing (HPC) centre.

In a collaboration with Dell last month, the HPC centre has announced it will publish the results of its work in building and running HPC stacks in the form of whitepapers and technical bulletins to share with the HPC community.

Two screens at the centre, above, show the time remaining for each job currently being processed by the HPC centre (left) and the temperature inside each compute node of the cluster (right).

From Dell to Intel, as the chip company also showcased what experimental tech it's been working on with its annual Research Day held last month at the Computer History Museum in California.

Once per year, the Research Day gives Intel's researchers a chance to show off their forward-thinking projects in a science fair-style exhibition.

The Holodeck Car, pictured above, enables a 3D projection of a full-size car that can allow engineers to fine-tune the fuel-efficiency of the vehicle and placement of different parts before ever having to manufacture a single model.

While iRobot may be best known for the Roomba, its cute vacuum-cleaning robot, its signature product is just the tip of the iceberg.

In some circles iRobot is better known for its military robots, including the PackBot and the SUGV, both small ground-based robots designed to go into combat situations in search of explosives, or to do search and rescue operations.

Pictured here is Ariel, a prototype from 1996. Designed to take mines and other obstacles out of shallow water, it allowed its operator to remain far away.